Falun Gong Adherents Will Contribute Significantly to the CCP’s Demise: Expert

Falun Gong practitioners attend a parade in Brooklyn, New York City, on Oct. 2, 2022, to call an end to the Chinese regime's persecution. (Zhang Jingchu/The Epoch Times).

Falun Gong adherents will contribute significantly to the termination of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), according to James Gorrie, author of “The China Crisis” and contributor to The Epoch Times.

“Every evil, every regime, evil or good, has a beginning and an end in history. So historically speaking, the CCP regime will one day end up on the ash heap of history. And I think the Falun Gong will have played a significant role in that,” Gorrie recently told “China in Focus” on NTD, the sister media outlet of The Epoch Times.

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual discipline involving meditative exercises and moral teachings based on three core principles: truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. The practice gained popularity in China during the 1990s, with estimates putting the number of adherents at 70 to 100 million at the height of its popularity.

The communist regime, fearing the number of practitioners posed a threat to its authoritarian control, initiated a sweeping campaign aimed at eradicating the practice starting on July 20, 1999, a program that continues today.

Since then, millions have been detained in prisons, labor camps, and other facilities, with hundreds of thousands tortured while incarcerated, according to the Falun Dafa Information Center.

According to the expert, the Chinese regime believes that Falun Gong practice, or “anything that provides a greater authority over one’s behavior than the state,” is a threat.

“And make no mistake about it. The state religion of China is Marxism with ‘Chinese characteristics,’ which essentially means a higher body count,” he added.

An Appeal With Noble and Historical Cause

Gorrie pointed to a peaceful gathering of about 10,000 religious adherents in communist China on April 25, 1999.

On that day, an estimated 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners gathered at the Appeals Office of the State Council in Beijing to appeal in accordance with the law for the release of 45 adherents who had been arrested in the city of Tianjin on April 23 and 24.

Riot police beat and arbitrarily arrested the practitioners on the heels of a slanderous article about Falun Gong published in a national magazine. Other incidents of practitioner harassment had been happening since June 1996, when the Propaganda Ministry instructed various levels of government to criticize the practice.

On April 25, then-Premier Zhu Rongji, the official head of the State Council, personally came out of the government compound to meet with the practitioners. A resolution was reached, and the thousands who had peacefully appealed quietly dispersed.

Less than three months later, however, on July 20, 1999, then-CCP leader Jiang Zemin officially initiated a nationwide brutal persecution campaign against Falun Gong adherents that continues today.

Even though the April appeal was peaceful, Gorrie said, the regime still decided to launch a suppression against the movement out of fear that “it will get international attention, it will gain a following, it will gain power, gain strength.

“Government doesn’t fear the people ... but the CCP has been waging war against Chinese people for a long time … So they fear their people much more than they fear anybody else,” he noted.

To prove his point, he cited a Financial Times report, saying China’s funding for state security apparatuses surpassed its defense budget a decade ago.

The public security budget has risen to almost 20 percent higher than the defense budget. “Domestic security costs first surpassed external defense costs in 2010, the year after deadly riots fuelled by ethnic tension broke out in Xinjiang’s capital of Urumqi,” the report stated.

To justify the initiation of the persecution, Gorrie said: “They did [what] typical authoritarian, totalitarian regimes, and illegitimate regimes do. They create a straw man, or they fictionalize an incident, and then rebrand it as a siege or as a rebellion or as an insurrection.”

According to Gorrie, the resistance event has a noble cause as it is “one of the green shoots pushing through a monolithic concrete slab of oppression and persecution.

“And I view it in the long term, as a great positive and as a great leader, as the avant-garde for liberty and human expression,” he said.

A Spiritual Battle

According to the expert, the popularity of the practice in over 100 countries versus the persecution against it in China manifests a spiritual battle against wickedness and the forces of evil.

“Most of humanity wants a society based on justice, self-control, humility, peace, and those types of things,” Gorrie said.

Meanwhile, he said, the CCP has perpetrated tremendous amounts of bad things in China. Thus, as people find strength in something that can’t be quenched by a bullet or a prison sentence, the CCP’s fear will grow.

“That’s why they rightfully fear it, illegitimate regimes fear everything, to be honest. Legitimate government doesn’t fear the people.”

Gorrie called the overall efforts to counter the CCP’s propaganda and persecution a noble and historical cause to stand up against evil and tyranny.

“I think going forward, they will continue to play a tremendous role because the more that China persecutes them the worse China looks” in the eyes of international communities, Gorrie said.

“The Falun Gong practitioners, they’re building on centuries of Confucianism and tremendous cultural attributes of Chinese culture that has been largely stripped away, but not forgotten, perhaps forgotten by many. But I think we’re seeing a reminder within China that those values and traditional values, and the way of the peaceful warrior, as it were, and self-control and self-discipline and humility, for their own sakes, is a wonderful thing,” he said.

“And Falun Gong has a tremendous amount of goodness to it. And I think that it’s very important in China, especially nowadays.”

Danella Pérez Schmieloz and Rita Li contributed to this report.